Blogs

When I launched my online course, Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals, one of the first companies that signed on for multiple students was Dolby Laboratories, Inc. Several students came from the Enterprise Encoding division, which is headed by Senior Director David Trescot. This is the group that created the Hybrik encoding platform acquired by Dolby in …

Adoption of MPEG-2, H.264, and HEVC was almost automatic in some markets because implementors assumed that royalties would be reasonable and that the codecs would succeed. Two factors have changed those assumptions; the HEVC royalty mess and the formation of the Alliance for Open Media. This short video details how these two factors have changed how codecs are deployed. If …

Pleased to share another five-star review of my online course Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. As the course tagline details, “This course teaches the fundamentals and skills necessary to succeed in a streaming media-related job, whether you’re producing and distributing streaming media or creating the tools, technologies, and services necessary to do so.” A recent student, …

Jan Ozer here. I spent the last 2 months working with four AV1 codecs, benchmarking them against each other and x264 and x265. I’m presenting my findings in this for-fee 75-minute webinar ($149.99).  There are two parts; the first shares what I learned about the codecs, and the second details what I learned about encoding with them and creating the …

This lesson is derived from my book, Learn to Produce Videos with FFmpeg In 30 Minutes or Less ($34.95), and my course, FFmpeg for Adaptive Bitrate Production ($29.95)  (which includes a PDF copy of the book). Don’t just learn FFmpeg; become an expert in video compression.  Overview: Setting your I-frame interval in seconds rather than frames allows you to use …

While standards-based video codecs like H.264 and HEVC tend to dominate, standards-based video quality metrics have never risen to the same usage or attention level. With two innovative and highly accurate metrics now available from the ITU-T, this may change in the near term. Briefly, these models are: ITU-T Rec. P.1203, which calculates the quality of HTTP Adaptive Streaming (HAS) …

Note: This update details how to compute VMAF with FFmpeg on Windows. From my perspective, this feature has gotten progressively less usable and increasingly frustrating. Documentation is poor and the syntax is idiosyncratic and hard to use. If you have any alternative, like Moscow State University’s Video Quality Measurement Tool, I would spend the money and get something that works …

Previous tests presented here showed that a Windows version of FFmpeg compiled by Zeranoe was about four times slower than a version compiled by a colleague who works in an OTT organization. Since then, Miguel Perez contacted the FFmpeg organization and Zeranoe, who researched the issue, recompiled, and created a new download that resolves the problem.  To test the new …